How to Listen to Your Inner Voice
PART I
Five years ago, my husband Jake was training
for a triathlon. He had just purchased a new road bike and woke up one sunny
Saturday morning to take it out for its first spin.
As we were lying in bed, he looked at me and
said, “I don’t have a good feeling about this; I hope something doesn’t
happen.”
I suggested if he had a bad feeling, maybe he
shouldn’t go. He thought for a moment, his logical mind kicked in, and he
replied, ”Of course I should go, it’s fine. I need to train. It will be
okay.”
Fast forward two hours later when I got a
call from an unknown number. I answered with trepidation, knowing exactly what
this call was going to be. A man told he had just found my husband in the
middle of the road. He had an accident and the ambulance was on its way. He
would stay with him until it was there.
Turns out, he was lucky to have just broken
his femur and hip. Jake knew that morning that something wasn’t right. But
instead of trusting his intuition and listening to that inner voice, he went
anyway. It happens to all of us.
You often hear people say, “Go with
your gut”, “Trust your instincts”, “Follow your
intuition” and “Listen to your inner voice.” That all
sounds great, right? If only it were that easy.
With all the external noise and internal
conflict, how do we listen to our inner wisdom?
When you can tune in to that inner voice, you
can make better and faster decisions, solve problems with greater ease, and
live a more fulfilled and happy life.
But HOW?
I’ve worked with thousands of people over the
course of my career and have learned that while this inner voice shows up in a
variety of ways for each of us, we ALL have it.
In this article, I’ll outline some tips and
strategies for how to identify and listen to your own inner
voice. If you can find that voice and truly listen, it can save you a lot of
time, energy, angst….and perhaps even a broken hip along the way.
I understand this might be easier for some
than others. But regardless of who you are and how you’re wired, I just know,
in my gut something will work for you.
What
is our inner voice?
Call it Gut. Knowing. Insight. Soul. Innate
Wisdom. That’s the voice we’re looking for.
The dictionary defines intuition as, “the
ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious
reasoning.”
It’s a hunch. A feeling. An inkling. A sense.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink: The
Power of Thinking Without Thinking”, he explores the inner processes of
intuition and instinct, examining how we make snap decisions and judgments. He
has numerous examples of people having a hunch, feeling or intuition and how,
while there was no hard evidence to back them up at first, science and data
eventually backed up what they knew to be true.
Did you know that 95% of our brain activity
happens at an unconscious level? Studies from numerous cognitive
neuroscientists show that only 5% of our cognitive activity (decisions,
emotions, actions, behavior) comes from our conscious mind.
We are taking in information through all our
senses all the time – and processing it at an incredible speed. So that
intuition, hunch, inkling, sense, voice, is coming from masses of information
we can’t even cognitively or consciously process.
Then there’s cognition. “The mental
action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought,
experience, and the senses.”
This is more about understanding. Problem
solving. Discernment. Organizing.
This is the logical, thinking part of your
mind. Weighing pros and cons; coming to rational conclusions based on data or
other factors. These are the voices of reason which often try to override your
instincts.
But
I don’t hear ANY voice.
Your inner guidance and wisdom aren’t always
a voice in your head. Often, it’s a feeling, a sensation, image, energy or
emotion. You might notice it your body. There’s no one best or way to
experience your inner voice. The important thing is to identify when and
where you feel it.
Is it a feeling in your gut?
This
is true for many of my clients and for me, personally. You may have heard the
gut being called our “second brain.” This is because of the enteric nervous
system (ENS). It can operate independently of the brain and spinal cord, and
the central nervous system. We really can think with our gut![1]
Celebrity therapist and pioneering
hypnotherapy trainer Marisa Peer has this to say: “The stomach is the
seat of all emotions and your feelings are the most real thing you have; so the
trick is to listen to your feelings. If something feels wrong, your inner voice
is saying it is not right for you. If you get the horrible lurch in your
stomach, your inner voice is telling you ‘this is wrong’.”
Perhaps it’s in your heart.
When
I asked a Jessie Gardner of HeySoul.com, a friend and colleague known for her
acute sense of self-awareness where her inner voice resides, she said, “My
heart for sure. Always my heart.” That’s no surprise, our hearts are very
intelligent organs.[2]
“Most people don’t know this, but the heart
can feel, think and decide for itself. It has around 40,000 neurons and whole
network of neurotransmitters with very specific functions, which make it a
perfect extension of the brain. It’s automatic, almost instinctive, as if a
mysterious, primal voice were telling us that the center of our true being, our
conscience, is located right there.”
Maybe the voice is in your head?
When
I talked to my Dad about his inner voice, he balked at the idea of feeling it
in his gut or heart. Instead, he shared about the voice that comes from the
back of his head that talks to him not with him.
Try this: Look, Listen, Feel.
We experience inner wisdom in different ways.
Maybe you relate to one of my examples? Maybe you “see” a picture, vision or
image that comes up in your head. Perhaps you feel sensations in your body –
energy, emotions or feelings. As we go through examples of how to listen, pay
attention to how and where yours shows up.
If
this inner voice is so powerful and effective, why don’t we listen?
Logic
or reason takes over.
We often have a feeling or a sense of
something, just like my husband did, but very quickly, our logical mind kicks
in to try to understand and comprehend what we feel. This especially happens
when we don’t have data or information to back up our hunch or inner voice. We,
and of course, others believe it’s not valid if we can’t justify or explain
ourselves. So we push our instincts aside.
A recent client told me about how he ignored
his inner voice not long ago. He dropped off his 16-year-old daughter at the
mall. As she got out of the car, he thought, “I should tell her to make
good choices.” But, because her friends were in the car and he didn’t
want to embarrass her, he decided not to. His logic, reason and social graces
took over. A few hours later he got a call from the mall police. His daughter
had stolen a ring. “I knew I should have told her to make good
choices.”
We often override our instincts with logic,
reason, desire, and, in this case, societal pressure or social graces. But we
don’t have to.
We
don’t like the answer.
Sometimes we know what we need to do, but
don’t like the answer. This happens with clients all the time when I ask what
they sense they should do. They answer, but then reply, “But I don’t
want to do that!”
Once, a client told me the story of her wedding,
and a knowing that she simply ignored. As she walked down the aisle, she knew that
she should not marry the man standing in front of her. Truthfully, she knew
long before that day. But she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, call off the
wedding, let friends and family down. So, she went through with it. Inevitably,
that marriage ended in divorce – and this story is all too common.
We
don’t know how to distinguish, hear or listen to it.
That’s what the following strategies are for!
Let’s dive in in PART II.
CONTINUES….LOOK FOR IT IN ANOTHER BLOG.
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